This week had been one of those weeks. Amidst the Chicago Public Schools strike, hearing about thousands of teachers fighting for their rights, it was business as usual at my charter school. I found myself waking up at the crack of dawn, dreading what was to come. The weather dropped arguably 20 degrees overnight, it was getting darker and darker when I woke up, and I couldn’t get my chatty 6th graders to shut up for more than one second. To top it off, one of my boys wrote an obscenely vulgar facebook message to a girl in my class, which was then sent to everyone in the entire grade. It was three days into the week, but it felt like it had been an eternity. When I walked into my bathroom, I saw the ring that I got in Israel and hadn’t worn in weeks.
In order to understand why…
My corps experience pretty much goes like this: work around the clock while eating, sleeping, and breathing teaching, then have a break and recollect my thoughts. Right now I’m on fall break so my thoughts seem clear and I finally have a chance to think. In doing so I have been thinking about my opinions…
read more »When I was young, I spent most of my childhood playing school. I would make up worksheets, have fake parent-teacher conferences, grade fake papers. I went above and beyond as a ten year old, literally completing a test for each imaginary kid. But that’s how I’ve always been: I didn’t do things the way people…
read more »When Teach for America speakers came up during our professional development days meant to inspire us with their uplifting stories, I would denounce what they said. I rejected the Teach for America jargon and ignored the success stories. We used to call it “drinking the kool-aid” (or still do) when someone had fallen under the…
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